s
there.

By the next morning the ship had run out of the fog; and people who could
keep their feet said they were glad of the greater motion which they
found beyond the Banks. They now talked of the heat of the first days
out, and how much they had suffered; some who had passed the night on
board before sailing tried to impart a sense of their misery in trying to
sleep.

A day or two later a storm struck the ship, and the sailors stretched
canvas along the weather promenade and put up a sheathing of boards
across the bow end to keep off the rain. Yet a day or two more and the
sea had fallen again and there was dancing on the widest space of the lee
promenade.

The little events of the sea outside the steamer offered themselves in
their poor variety. Once a ship in the offing, with all its square sails
set, lifted them like three white towers from the deep. On the rim of the
ocean the length of some westward liner blocked itself out against the
horizon, and swiftly trailed its smoke out of sight. A few tramp
steamers, lounging and lunging through the trough of the sea, were
overtaken and left behind; an old brigantine passed so close that her
rusty iron sides showed plain, and one could discern the faces of the
people on board.

The steamer was oftenest without the sign of any life beyond her. One day
a small bird beat the air with its little wings, under the roof of the
promenade, and then flittered from sight over the surface, of the waste;
a school of porpoises, stiff and wooden in their rise, plunged clumsily
from wave to wave. The deep itself had sometimes the unreality, the
artificiality of the canvas sea of the theatre. Commonly it was livid and
cold in color; but there was a morning when it was delicately misted, and
where the mist left it clear, it was blue and exquisitely iridescent
under the pale sun; the wrinkled waves were finely pitted by the falling
spray. These were rare moments; mostly, when it was not like painted
canvas, is was hard like black rock, with surfaces of smooth cleavage.
Where it met the sky it lay flat and motionless, or in the rougher
weather carved itself along the horizon in successions of surges.

If the sun rose clear, it was overcast in a few hours; then the clouds
broke and let a little sunshine through, to close again before the dim
evening thickened over the waters. Sometimes the moon looked through the
ragged curtain of vapors; one night it seemed to shine till morning, an